Katherine Anne Porter--The Last Leaf, The Grave

It seems to me that while Katherine Anne Porter’s works reflect a period of much change in the South, certain aspects of life seem rooted in Southern thought and will take more time to change. The Grandmother is dreading and resenting many of the gender role changes, for example, that she notices accompanying the change from the Old South to the New South. She laments the modern women, as she considers them, who want to vote and picks apart her grandchildren’s wanton ways. Yet The Grave reveals that even her overall-wearing, bareback horse-riding granddaughter Miranda still follows some of the traditional aspects of the female role that she is supposed to play.

When Miranda and her brother Paul hunt game, “Miranda always followed at Paul’s heels along the path, obeying instructions about handling her gun … learning how to stand it up properly…how to wait her time for a shot and not just bang away in the air without looking, spoiling shots for Paul, who really could hit things if given a chance” (50). I think that this quote shows that even while Miranda was being an unconventional female and hunting for sport, she still acknowledges that Paul is the leader. She must learn from him, and even the act of her following behind him shows that he is in charge and a protector of sorts. Miranda must not interfere, much like the way Grandmother in The Old Order expresses that she “learned early” in life that she must “keep silent” around the men who would visit because “there was no way of accounting for them nor any way of controlling their quietly headstrong habits” (24). I think these quotes indicate that Miranda has picked up on this unspoken law that females are not supposed to interfere in the dealings of men.

The line about Miranda and Paul’s hunt that expresses that Paul can actually shoot the animals implies that Miranda typically cannot, and this reminded me an opinion that was expressed as fact in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. He explains that the Native American male is “less strong than [the white male], but their woman stronger than ours; and both for the same obvious reason; because our man and their woman is habituated to labour, and formed by it” (43). Jefferson means that since white men and Native American women have to do physical labor (including hunting) as part of their work, they are each the stronger sex among their race. I found this notion expressed in the condescending way in which Porter presented Miranda’s ability to hunt and feelings about doing so. Not only was she not skilled at it, but also only likes “‘pulling the trigger and hearing the noise”’ (51). Porter shows Miranda to have a silly perception of hunting, and by choosing to make the female character the one who views hunting this way, Porter reinforces the historical notion that white women are not fit for hunting.

I find Jefferson’s comment about white men’s strength ironic when considered in the context of Porter’s writing. White men hardly have to work at all because they have black servants (that used to be slaves) to do their work for them. The Grandmother describes in The Old Order her husband and a brother of hers each as desiring “everyone around him [to] wait upon him hand and foot” (21). Evidently these men were not doing much work, and it is apparent that the men in her family in general do not work hard because as soon as the servant Nannie, in her old age, goes to live in solitude at the edge of their property in The Last Leaf, nothing gets done anymore. This is because “They had not learned how to work for themselves, they were all lazy and incapable of sustained effort or planning” (44). Clearly the white men of the South in Porter’s account are not as strong and capable as the white men depicted by Jefferson. Instead Porter shows that blacks bear the brunt of the work, and she presents neither white women nor white men as being particularly physically strong.